The story of John Adams is a truly American one. Raised in Massachusetts and trained as a composer at Harvard, at the age of 24 he headed west to San Francisco in order to distance himself from his neo-European upbringing. Shaker Loops, written in the heyday of American minimalism, helped to earn him a place as one of the most famous living composers. It borrows the technique of looping fragments of melody from Steve Reich’s early tape experiments, and continues to be one of Adams’ most frequently performed works. Also included on this disc is Short Ride in a Fast Machine, four minutes of pure aural adrenaline, and The Wound- Dresser, a pensive adaptation of Walt Whitman’s poem about his experiences as a nurse during the civil war.

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If you are seeking an introduction to the music of John Adams, you cannot better this splendidly played anthology from Marin Alsop and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, vividly recorded within an ideal acoustic. The whizzing Short Ride in a Fast Machine immediately has hit potential but finds its counterpart in the touchingly gentle Berceuse élégiaque, while the moving lament of the Walt Whitman civil war Wound Dresser shows just how naturally Adams writes for the voice. It is finely sung by Nathan Gunn against the simplest orchestral backcloth, with strings dominating. But the highlight of the disc is Adams’s early (1978) masterpiece, heard here in a 1983 revision, Shaker Loops. Here he draws on the minimalist style of Steve Reich and totally transforms it into a four-movement piece of real lyrical appeals and endless aural fascination. This is now by far its finest performance on disc, with the climax of the third-movement ‘loops and Verses’ quite riveting.

The score to Rameau's last opera, "Les Boreades," was written (and shelved) in 1763 and only rediscovered in 1982. Alphise is a queen who must marry within her class. Her choices: a couple of suitors, both duds, from the clan of the harsh god of the North Wind, Boreas. Naturally, she's in love with a mortal. (Happy ending: He turns out to be Apollo's son.)

Although the conductor isn't seen in "Les Boreades," he is the core of the performance. Buffalo-born and Harvard-educated, William Christie is dean of the French early-music scene. As usual, he draws crisp, nuanced, immaculate playing from his Les Arts Florissants ensemble, supporting energized singers and dancers.

As Alphise, Barbara Bonney -- who sings regularly with the ASO -- has a light lyric soprano that sometimes strains to fit the heavier dramatic vocal needs, although by conviction she inhabits the role.

What lingers here, aside from the astonishing variety of Rameau's music, is stage director Robert Carsen's painterly, understated production. The stage is a field of bright flowers, torn up by the followers of Boreas. Later, falling leaves, or rain showers, wash down on the singers. (The horrible North Wind brings bad weather as it blows.)

If Rameau is indeed making a comeback, these sorts of enchanting productions -- classical yet modern -- will get much of the credit. In a post-opera "making of" film about "Les Boreades," Bonney delivers the best marketing line: "I do love the music of Rameau. It's very sexy music."

logy, had a successful debut in 1691 and was subsequently revived.

Then the score disappeared for nearly 300 years until an American musicologist uncovered it in 1970 in the Library of Congress. In 2003, the Boston Early Music Festival staged the first production of ��Ariadne�� since the 18th century at the Cutler Majestic Theater with most of the cast heard on the three-CD recording made at Radio Bremen in northern Germany.

��Ariadne�� tells the story of the ��beautiful and faithful�� daughter of the King of Minos on Crete. She�s initially in love with the apparently doomed Athenian Prince Theseus who must do battle with the fearsome Minotaur. However, after slaying the monster Theseus

WHEN several major American orchestras found themselves simultaneously looking for music directors some years back, the name of the American conductor Marin Alsop was noticeably missing from the shortlists. Though Ms. Alsop had long been hailed as a dynamic conductor with an adventurous spirit and a palpable connection to the music of her time, and though she had achieved excellent results as the head of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, you suspected that the tradition-bound major orchestras were simply not ready to take the step of appointing a woman as music director.

But overseas, the respected Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra was. In 2002 Ms. Alsop became its music director: the first woman to head any major British orchestra. Today, things could not be going better in Bournemouth. The orchestra sounds great, the players are energized, and the recordings they have been making for Naxos are exciting, including this impressive program.

The breathless performance of "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" vibrantly conveys the quality of John Adams's music that the conductor Simon Rattle has likened to "a light aircraft, flying rather fast and close to the ground." The accounts of the wistful "Berceuse Élégiaque" and the ecstatic "Shaker Loops," a de facto four-movement symphony, are incisive and bracing.

Best of all, perhaps, is Ms. Alsop's intense yet magisterial performance of "The Wound-Dresser," a sensitive setting of Walt Whitman's poetic remembrance of serving as a nurse during the Civil War. The soloist is the fine American baritone Nathan Gunn, whose warm and virile voice provides comfort as you contemplate Whitman's heartbreaking words.

This album makes me eager to hear Ms. Alsop's recordings of the complete Brahms symphonies, due from Naxos this year. It's about time she is given a chance to show what she can do in repertory staples.

“Two things particularly excited me about John’s music,” said conductor Simon Rattle. “One was that it always seemed to be moving forward in space, that I would imagine while listening to it that I was in a light aircraft flying rather fast, close to the ground. The other thing is that, in almost all of his best pieces, there’s a mixture of ecstasy and sadness.” This quotation, from one of the world’s pre-eminent conductors, pretty well sums up the appeal on the work of composer John Adams: its immediacy, its speed (even when slow), and its power, like all great art, to give catharsis through despondency, despair, or even through frantic motion.

The story of John Adams is a truly American one, in the vein of the peripatetic journeyman ranging from Johnny Appleseed to Bob Dylan to the former president who shares his name. Raised in Massachusetts, Adams, in 1971, the tail end of the “love generation”, packed his things into a Volkswagen Bug and headed west to San Francisco, the apex of the waning revolution, in order to distance himself from his neo-European upbringing. He was a trained composer, studying at Harvard with eminent mentors like Leon Kirchner, David Del Tredici and Roger Sessions, pursuing not only composition but conducting and playing the clarinet as well. However, in order to shuffle off this petit bourgeois training, and to reconcile himself with the wave of popular music in which he felt himself (perhaps in spite of his Ivy League affiliation) swept up, Adams, rather than deny it, ran toward it, to California.

This split explains Adams’ oeuvre very well. Who else but such a polyglot could write both the gloomy, sedate Wound-Dresser, the Rent aspirant opera I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky, and the ersatz electronica of Hoodoo Zephyr? When he got to the coast, his career blossomed, and he created pieces for all media: from film scores and operas to symphonies, concertos, string quartets, and think pieces for orchestra, enduring works like Harmonielehre, Harmonium, The Chairman Dances (a suite taken from his opera Nixon in China) and two of the gems found on this disc, Short Ride in a Fast Machine and Shaker Loops.

Adams went on to become one of the most famous composers in the world, with awards too numerous to mention (though the 2002 Pulitzer Prize deserves special dispensation) and new recordings always being released. He conducts regularly, both his own music and that of others, and has earned his place in the mighty triumvirate of American Minimalist composers alongside Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

Short Ride in a Fast Machine is, as the title suggests, a whirling dervish of a piece, where a huge orchestra is juggernauted in to four minutes of high speed life by the insistence of a wood block. Composed as a companion piece to a slow, anti-fanfare called Tromba Lontana, this is four minutes of open throttle fireworks, a concert (or disc) opener if there ever was one. The piece was first performed in 1986 by a young conductor called Michael Tilson Thomas, who would go on to become music director of the San Francisco Symphony, where Adams is composer-inresidence.

Adams’ Nixon, in his opera Nixon in China, was a golden-voiced baritone called Sanford Sylvan, for whom he wrote the gloomy, lamenting Whitman setting called The Wound-Dresser. Whitman was himself a nurse during the civil war, and he wrote, in his inimitable elegiac fashion, of these terrible times, speaking bluntly about the “stump of arm” or “perforated shoulder” or “crush’d head”, all horrid sights he bore witness to while doing his duty. Adams, in making his piece, accents the solemnity and dignity of Whitman’s heroic, unheralded acts of bravery. The music itself, scored for orchestra and baritone, is one of the slowest, most pensive compositions in the Adams canon. Strings dominate, in sparse (but somehow heavy) textures, and though the text is quite brutally dramatic, Adams does not soup it up; his admirable restraint gives the work’s repetition a monodic quality, like a prayer or an atonement, and the words float gorgeously above the orchestra. There is a build (in Adams’ work, there is always a build), but climaxes in this piece are understated and tasteful. This piece is sort of a brother to Harmonium, his setting of three poems of Emily Dickinson. Both deal in the nineteenth century (in different ways), and both poets are, like Adams, at root, salt-of-the-earth New Englanders.

Many think of Shaker Loops, a piece Adams wrote in the mid-1970s, when minimalism in New York was peaking, the period of Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts or Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, seminal works both from the same period. The work began as a piece for string quartet called Wavemaker, something he has since withdrawn, and now ends in this version, for string orchestra. He based the piece on “shaking”, translating this to trills and tremolos. “The ‘loops’,” writes Adams, in liner notes to a prior recording, “are small melodic fragments whose ‘tails,’ so to speak, are tied to their ‘heads,’ creating loops of repeated melodies, a technique borrowed from tape music composition.” He is referring here to Reich’s monumental pieces like Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain, where small fragments of tape were played at speeds just different enough to, over time, create a ‘phasing’ effect. He is also, in his title, referring to a religious sect that made their home near his own rural New Hampshire town. “I would try to imagine,” writes Adams, “what a Shaker ceremony must have felt like—those normally stern souls suddenly sprung loose in a rapture of religious ecstasy as they shook in sympathetic vibration with their creator.”

The piece is cast in four movements, called Shaking and Trembling, Hymning Slews, Loops and Verses and A Final Shaking. The first is rapturous and exciting, fast and wildly caffeinated; the second is a break from the frenzy of the first, favoured by glissandi (sliding around on the strings) and pitting intrusions (rounded and mellow) of the high strings against the lush chords of the lower ones, ending with a collective shimmer; the third is a slow burn, picking up where the second left off and running far afield, moving slowly from a low, throaty cello melody to a shake, to a scamper, to an all out blast, and ending with a sluff-off to the highest, most crystalline register; the fourth, and final movement, makes reference to the first, but in a colder, more controlled way, as the piece dwindles to a calculated whimper.

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